Dimming my DIY LEDs

[smithben1983]

Okay so I am so frustrated with my DIY LED set up I can not even tell you. I hope everything I say make sense, with my frustration and lack of typing skills I feel its going to be rough.Lets start of with my APEX, I have an APEX full in my basement near my sump with a EB8 down there. I than ran a USB up to my main level to another EB8 and a VDM. the VDM controls 2 tunzes I have. I got this kit of DIY LEDs.http://www.rapidled.com/standard-180g-tank-dimmable-kit/I also added moonlights. So the plan was to run to CAT6 wires from the base up to the drivers under the tank Ch. 1 for blues, Ch. 2 for whites, Ch. 3 for the UVs and Ch.4 for the red and greens. the moons are using Ch.2 on the VDM under the tank.The Blues and UVs didn't seam to be dimming at all and it seams that even when the VDM profiles where off if I turned on the EB8 outlet that the blues or UVs are plugged into they would light up. so after doing some reading. I read that there has been issues with the VDM ports on the base unit have had issues with putting out to much power. So I thought, well I bought my controller used thats what you get, I went out and bought a 2nd VDM today, the store was sold out of the dimming cables. I have tried a few differant cables and everyone of them the V1 and V3 outlets on the new VDM are doing the same thing as they did on the base!!! I tried hooking the blues to the open Ch. 2 on the VDM that is running the tunzes and it worked fine.I have spent so much time on these LEDs and now this. I want to take my whole fish tank and put it in a trash can. I thought the LED build would be fun. this is far from fun at this point.Another thing. I was trying to test my new VDM and when I hooked up Ch.1 and I think I tried Ch. 3 as well to the meter(I don't know much about how to use it, keep in mind.) it was like making the LED fans turn on and stuff blink. Nothing was plugged into the VDM when that was happen. My fans run only off the EB8. I am truly stumped and would love some thoughts ASAP. My tank is in need of some light.

 

[rajkovich207]

My. 02 if it works on some of the channles and not the other, than only some of them are pwm enabled. I don't own an apex so I'm not sure if you can, but you may need to Daisy chain the vdms or just buy a dedicated led controller its about 80 bucks for something like the typhoon. Or you can build one for a little bit less.

 

[rajkovich207]

Also did you get the pwm drivers or the analog drivers? If analog, you can not dim via controller, only with a potientiometer (sorry if that's spelled wrong to lazy to look it up lol, also abbreviated as pot) you would have to upgrade to them pwm drivers. Pwm means pulse width modulation, basically the led blinks incredibly fast while Inc or dec voltage giving you the impression it is dimming. Hth and good luck!

 

[vbsaltydog]

This is exactly why I have stated that the Apex is not nearly the high quality item that people claim it to be. There should be a way to see the power output of each channel of each varspd port (base unit and/or VDM module) and there should be a way to manually increment/decrement that power (per channel) so you can easily see that channel x on port x is sending x power to the driver that is wired into that port/channel. If you can see those readings then you can easily move on to diagnosing the problem at the driver level vs getting out volt meters and tapping into the wiring, etc.

 

[smithben1983]

well I messed up.
http://www.lanshack.com/make_cat_6_cable.aspx
L[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]ooking at this site I realized that I was using the wrong wires. My cables are using the wiring B set up and I was using blue and blue strip and should have been using blue and green strip.[/FONT]

 

[fragmatic]

Ok, here is a common problem with LED builds. This is if you did the soldering work. I have been guilty myself. It is very easy to have a TINY (as in itty bitty) piece of wire strand or solder touching something else like ground or heatsink or another board part. With LEDs this can make them do some really strange things. Check like this-> Take two D cell batteries and tape them together, and solder them in series, then solder a red wire to the + and a black wire to the +. Take this rig and touch each LED's + & -. Each one will fire bright when you do this, and wear sun glasses while you do this. They can be in the circuit, it will not hurt the circuit. If you find one that does not fire right, check it for the first condition I wrote here, ore wired backwards.

 

[fragmatic]

Ok, here is a common problem with LED builds. This is if you did the soldering work. I have been guilty myself. It is very easy to have a TINY (as in itty bitty) piece of wire strand or solder touching something else like ground or heatsink or another board part. With LEDs this can make them do some really strange things. Check like this-> Take two D cell batteries and tape them together, and solder them in series, then solder a red wire to the + and a black wire to the +. Take this rig and touch each LED's + & -. Each one will fire bright when you do this, and wear sun glasses while you do this. They can be in the circuit, it will not hurt the circuit. If you find one that does not fire right, check it for the first condition I wrote here, ore wired backwards.

oops, clearly I meant the black wire to the -. Thank you.